— including the leak to POLITICO and the subsequent investigation — had yet to be quelled.
Up to that moment, the court rarely spoke about its inner workings, and justices typically refrained from engaging publicly with news reports that drew unflattering attention to them or their conduct. With that issue off the table, Roberts offered a full-throated denunciation of the leak as “a singular and egregious breach” and announced an internal probe into the source of the leak.
Some of those security measures would likely have been put in place if the opinion emerged in the ordinary course in late June, but the early report and the intensity of public reaction to it led to a scramble. Just one week after the disclosure, the Senate passed legislation making explicit the power of the Supreme Court police to protect the immediate families of the justices.
While many outsiders assumed Roberts would simply order the court’s clerks to cooperate with the leak investigation, he instead asked each justice to make such a request of his or her law clerks. Kagan also went on the warpath, giving her clerks a similar dressing down. Kagan would later denounce the leak as “horrible” and an “obvious, blatant violation of the court’s rules,” without speculating on who might be responsible,Within days, it became clear that the leak had taken a serious toll on court morale. Speaking at a conservative gathering in Texas, Thomas said the leak had“Now, that trust … is gone forever,” the court’s most senior justice said.
Within a couple of months of the court’s investigation launching, the law clerks were gone, replaced by a new batch that got much sterner warnings about confidentiality. Another figure key to the probe also headed for the exit: Nelson, the chief deputy marshal.
Alito added a rebuttal to the dissenters, but the only notable deletion from the draft was a rhetorical flourish he dropped about the degree of support for abortion rights in U.S. constitutional law before the late 1960s. “Zero. None,” Alito had written in the draft, but omitted in the final opinion while maintaining his basic point.
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